Aggressive "answer" boxes. So you search for a question, and Google provides not just necessarily a featured snippet, which can earn you a click-through, but a box that truly answers the searcher's question, that comes directly from Google themselves, or a set of card-style results that provides a list of all the things that the person might be looking for.
In addition to helping you find keywords you should be bidding on, thorough keyword research can also help you identify negative keywords – search terms that you should exclude from your campaigns. Negative keywords aren’t terms with negative connotations, but rather irrelevant terms that are highly unlikely to result in conversions. For example, if you sell ice cream, you might want to exclude the keyword “ice cream recipes”, as users searching for ice cream recipes are unlikely to be in the market for your product.

Utilizing keywords in your URLs will also help with your rankings. Unfortunately, there isn’t much you can do to change the home page URL of your website without your domain authority being reset. However, each additional page you add is a place to insert a keyword, as long as it is relevant to the actual page content. We’ll go over blogging shortly, but URLs of blog posts are a great place to use your keywords.

Look at your short- and long-term goals to choose whether to focus on organic or paid search (or both). It takes time to improve your organic search rankings, but you can launch a paid search campaign tomorrow. However, there are other considerations: the amount of traffic you need, your budget, and your marketing objectives. Once you’ve reviewed the pros and cons, you can select the search strategy that’s right for you.
hey james - congrats on your success here. just a question about removing crummy links. for my own website, there are hundreds of thousands of backlinks in webmaster tools pointing to my site. The site has no penalties or anything - the traffic seems to be growing every week. would you recommend hiring someone to go through the link profile anyway to remove crummy links that just occur naturally?
With organic search, you don’t have to outspend your competitors to outrank them. Your competitors can’t recreate the content experience that you use to drive organic traffic. This one is major. PPC is easy to replicate and reverse engineer. Many spy tools allow you to dissect paid campaigns to see what’s working and what’s not. You can get insight into what ad creatives generate the most clicks.
Social media is adopting its own form of SEO in a way that promotes a positive user experience. The way this algorithm works is by putting your posts in a pool as small as one percent of your followers. If those people engage with the content, then it gets introduced into a larger pool. Slowly but surely, more and more people see it, but only if it’s engaging.
Of course, there is a lot more that needs to be considered but this is a simple example of how all of these things work together. I would recommend having no less than one page for each step of the organic marketing plan if you are a small business. The larger your business the more planning that you should do. If you do not think through all the details you will miss something that will cost you.
The term “organic traffic” is used for referring to the visitors that land on your website as a result of unpaid (“organic”) search results. Organic traffic is the opposite of paid traffic, which defines the visits generated by paid ads. Visitors who are considered organic find your website after using a search engine like Google or Bing, so they are not “referred” by any other website.
So for the last 19 years or 20 years that Google has been around, every month Google has had, at least seasonally adjusted, not just more searches, but they've sent more organic traffic than they did that month last year. So this has been on a steady incline. There's always been more opportunity in Google search until recently, and that is because of a bunch of moves, not that Google is losing market share, not that they're receiving fewer searches, but that they are doing things that makes SEO a lot harder.
And the other way to do that is really through status updates, very short simple things to start engaging your audience, talk about the things you’re learning in the business world. And when it comes to what that strategy can look like, what I always recommend is you sit down with whoever you think are going to be your thought leaders and figure out what part of the business do they really want to position themselves as a thought leader about.
Another tip you can use is just reach out to the prior agency and say something like the following: “We realise you were using link networks for our website which has resulted in a Google penalty and loss in business. Can you please remove my website from any link network you have built?”. If the prior agency is decent, they will remove the links from the network.
Many page owners think that organic reach (the number of unique individuals who see your post pop up in their news feeds) is enough to make an impact. This was true in the first few years of Facebook but is no longer the case. Facebook, and many other social media networks is truly a pay-to-play network. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn are all on algorithmic feeds, meaning posts are shown to the user based on past behavior and preferences instead of in chronological order. Organic posts from your Facebook page only reach about 2% of your followers, and that number is dropping. Facebook recently announced that, in order to correct a past metrics error, it is changing the way it reports viewable impressions, and organic reach will be 20% lower on average when this change takes effect.
With 88 million tech-reliant Millennials taking their places as decision makers in households and the workforce, crafting a strong online presence is more important than ever. According to the Harvard Business Review, Millennials will account for over 50% of the workforce by next year. Already, this demographic shift, in combination with rapidly developing technology, is drastically changing the way successful companies go to market.
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I would also advise to continue doing what works. If something you have rolled out generates great traffic and links bring out a new version of the content, for example the 2012 version worked effectively bring out the 2013 version of the content. Another effective strategy is to make the piece of content into an evergreen article which you add to over time so it is always up to date.

What you are in fact talking about, are Google's death stars like the Shopping box, Knowledge Graph etc. It's fully understandable why many SEOs can't stand them 'cause whole categories of websites (price comparison platforms, for instance) have already fallen victim of such death stars, and there will be certainly numerous other portals, which will lose almost all of their traffic in the near future. Despite your (quite good) suggestions on how to circumvent such an issue, the situation for such an endangered portal can be hopeless when it's its whole business model, which a new Google feature makes obsolete. See geizhals.at for a very famous example.

Hi Rand! Thanks for a really informative and thought provoking Whiteboard Friday. I agree with Namrata about the challenges to local and small businesses that all the rapid changes with little to know warning from Google as far as they're concerned. In many cases, they're just rapping their heads and marketing strategies around having someone create and optimize their website and content for how Google SERPs used to work, and even with basic GMB listings, they have been unaware or unsure of how to use them. Some have been taken advantage of because of lack of understanding and awareness of how Google listings and GMB work and that it's free.
Everyone wants to rank for those broad two or three word key phrases because they tend to have high search volumes. The problem with these broad key phrases is they are highly competitive. So competitive that you may not stand a chance of ranking for them unless you devote months of your time to it. Instead of spending your time going after something that may not even be attainable, go after the low-hanging fruit of long-tail key phrases.
Using the insight from the Data Cube can serve your blog content creation process in two ways. To begin, you will be able to create posts that align themselves well with what people seek online. This will increase the traffic to your page and help you to boost engagement. Secondly, since you are maintaining a steady stream of high-value posts that are tailored to the interests of your target audience, you will have a far easier time building consistent readership and encouraging people to move through the sales funnel.
Using the insight from the Data Cube can serve your blog content creation process in two ways. To begin, you will be able to create posts that align themselves well with what people seek online. This will increase the traffic to your page and help you to boost engagement. Secondly, since you are maintaining a steady stream of high-value posts that are tailored to the interests of your target audience, you will have a far easier time building consistent readership and encouraging people to move through the sales funnel.

There’s also a lot of stuff even just around how much having a few simple images in your LinkedIn Pulse or blog post can really increase engagement. We’re becoming a much more visual society as it is. If you look at every social network, there’s now the ability to do video, to add photos. And so the more that you can capitalize on that, the better.

Keyword research and analysis involves three "steps": ensuring the site can be indexed in the search engines, finding the most relevant and popular keywords for the site and its products, and using those keywords on the site in a way that will generate and convert traffic. A follow-on effect of keyword analysis and research is the search perception impact.[13] Search perception impact describes the identified impact of a brand's search results on consumer perception, including title and meta tags, site indexing, and keyword focus. As online searching is often the first step for potential consumers/customers, the search perception impact shapes the brand impression for each individual.
If we can do that effectively, it is in the best interest of the search engine to serve our content to our target audience for us, providing highly targeted visitors to our pages at no incremental cost. This is the secret to the organic channel, and why organic search listings are so valuable. Other channels often come with additional cost for each new visitor provided.
James, you give a great template for how a business needs to move forward in their chosen niche online. Quite informative and the meeting of minds has been something a number of us have done online and in person to gain better insight into our small similar businesses. Thank you for sharing your detailed approach to increasing organic traffic...content still is king.
When it is time for your organization to start creating new products or enhancing items already on your product line, organic search can maximize your efficiency and gauge market demand. You will be able to see which products are sparking the most interest through increases or decreases in organic search. You can then take the information from the Data Cube and compare it to trends within your own sites and the performance of your competitors to create a product line that maximizes your investment.
Keyword research and analysis involves three "steps": ensuring the site can be indexed in the search engines, finding the most relevant and popular keywords for the site and its products, and using those keywords on the site in a way that will generate and convert traffic. A follow-on effect of keyword analysis and research is the search perception impact.[13] Search perception impact describes the identified impact of a brand's search results on consumer perception, including title and meta tags, site indexing, and keyword focus. As online searching is often the first step for potential consumers/customers, the search perception impact shapes the brand impression for each individual.
Search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns generate organic traffic. The goal of SEO is to improve website ranking for relevant keywords. You want your website to show up on the first page of organic search results – ‘organic’ refers to the middle section of results you see in search engines – for what you’re selling, and you’d probably be considered super human if you did that without organic SEO.

A good example is Facebook Custom Audiences. Within this Facebook supports email targeting, the ability to upload customer email addresses and then target those users on Facebook with tailored ads. This lets you micro-segment based on your existing customer database. One application is customer loyalty marketing, promoting offers to existing high value users via Facebook ads.

I am too much late to commenting on this article. I want to read "How much get Organic traffic by SEO", found your your article on top & really very interesting. James Norquay, you did good research.I think Now days google block mostly SEO activities. Is this worthy for current marketing scnerio?If any other post to related strategy for increasing Organic traffic, you can reffer me.
To find the right people I downloaded a list of some of the most popular users within the community. To do this, I used Screaming Frog SEO Spider to gather a list of all the URLs on the website. I then exported this list into an Excel spreadsheet and filtered the URLs to only show those that were user profile pages. I could do this because all of the profile pages had /user/ within the URL.

With stats like that, you’re probably wondering why you should even bother with organic posts. Although organic reach is low, it’s still important to have an active, consistent presence on social media. Your Facebook page, Instagram account, Twitter profile, etc. are often where people turn to for updates from your company or to ask questions. Low organic reach doesn’t mean you should stop posting organically all together—it means you should focus more of your efforts on a paid social media strategy while maintaining a solid organic strategy.

Fix the meta description. Phil Tadros, leader of coworking space Space Doejo, emphasized the importance of the meta description. “I went out of my way to spend time tweaking and fine-tuning the meta description of my site," Tadros said, "because this is one of the first things people see. It’s vital that you make a promise you can keep.” Your meta description is your first chance to encourage people to click on to your website. There are plenty of plugins allowing you to edit the meta description if you don’t have a custom-made platform. A meta description may not impact SEO directly the way it used to, but it enhances the user experience.
An important thing to note is the effect that localized searches will have on search engines. For example, say you’re in Atlanta and you’re looking for a photographer for your wedding. When you search “wedding photography” it wouldn’t be helpful to see results of photographers in Los Angeles. This is why Google takes into account where you are when you search for certain words, and shows you listings from businesses that are close in proximity to you.

For example, you may repurpose your blog content into a different form to satisfy the needs of your social media audience. You may decide to put more resources into email marketing as a traffic driver. You may tighten up your brand story because you want your messaging to be more congruent across all customer touchpoints. All these marketing tasks are tied to organic traffic. And they all have a substantial impact on your bottom line.

There are also a few more similarities. All of these marketing methods are measurable to an extent never seen in any other media. Every click can be measured – where and when it came – and followed through to the conversion, the sale and the lifetime customer value. This feedback loop creates optimization opportunities that can create huge incremental improvements in your SEM campaigns.

The last thing you need to do is evaluate the results and simply do it all over again. You will need to be constantly reassessing your organic marketing plan. The situation, audience, and goals will be constantly changing. Your marketing plan will need to change to adapt to this flux. You should reevaluate your organic marketing strategy at least every quarter.

Good question, for most directories I use they ask for mobile number to send a message of verification, for the ones which phone you for verification inform the company before hand to tell their customer service people to be ready. I know the bigger the company the more tricky these things get you just have to find out what works best to answer the calls even if they give you a direct number to use.
What you are in fact talking about, are Google's death stars like the Shopping box, Knowledge Graph etc. It's fully understandable why many SEOs can't stand them 'cause whole categories of websites (price comparison platforms, for instance) have already fallen victim of such death stars, and there will be certainly numerous other portals, which will lose almost all of their traffic in the near future. Despite your (quite good) suggestions on how to circumvent such an issue, the situation for such an endangered portal can be hopeless when it's its whole business model, which a new Google feature makes obsolete. See geizhals.at for a very famous example.
Amber Kemmis is the VP of Client Services at SmartBug Media. Having a psychology background in the marketing world has its perks, especially with inbound marketing. My past studies in human behavior and psychology have led me to strongly believe that traditional ad marketing only turns prospects away, and advertising spend never puts the right message in front of the right person at the right time. Thus, resulting in wasted marketing efforts and investment. I'm determined to help each and every one of our clients attract and retain new customers in a delightful and helpful way that leads to sustainable revenue growth. Read more articles by Amber Kemmis.